Worth Knowing: The chicken and de-extinction

• The lecture is in English
• Lunch is served from 11:45
• Seating is limited and will be distributed on a first come, first served basis

With the advent of de-extinction, science is attempting some of the most extreme physical alterations at the genomic level to date, and has certainly captured the public imagination. Typically (though not exclusively) the technology behind these initiatives involves taking the nearest living relative to the extinct species and then altering the appearance and behaviour to match that of the extinct species as much as possible. 

Depending on the degree of differences between the extant (living) and extinct (dead) species, this can mean considerable alterations, not only morphological but also physiological and behavioural in nature. For example, the extinct passenger pigeon’s closest living relative is the band-tailed pigeon. In this case, de-extinction involves some morphological traits (longer tail and iridescent pink breast patch), but also large behavioural differences (the passenger pigeon bred in large colonies, and lived in huge flocks of hundreds of thousands of birds). Such extreme phenotypic modification is no small feat to perform, and asks the question if transgenic rewriting of the genome is actually feasible to induce such alterations in sufficient volume. 

The main issue is that you can only actually change a relatively small number of regions, so which regions should be selected? To test how feasible this is Dominic Wright and his team introduce a project where they will use a domestic chicken and try to turn it into a wild chicken, using a similar approach to that being used in de-extinction.

Dominic Wright is a Professor in Molecular Animal Genetics at the Department of Animal Biosciences.

Take part online, live or afterwards

If you are unable to attend in the studio, you can watch live on SLU Play and on the SLU University Library’s Facebook page. The lecture will also be available to watch afterwards on SLU Play, but it will take a couple of weeks before it is published there.

• Watch the lecture on SLU Play
• The SLU University Library on Facebook

Worth knowing

Worth knowing is the SLU University Library’s popular science lunchtime lecture series. Here, exciting and recent research results from SLU are presented. We offer a light lunch, and after the lecture, listeners have the opportunity to ask questions.

• More about Worth knowing, programme and recordings of previous lectures